HOW TO...

Back up, clone and erase hard drives for free

by Nik Rawlinson

What you need: MultiDrive Time required: One hour (plus additional time for backups)

MultiDrive is a fantastic free tool for backing up, cloning and securely erasing hard drives. It’s powerful and – once you know your way around it – easy to use. Here, we’ll guide you through using the four key features that will help you to keep your data secure.

To download it, visit www.multidrive.io and click the Download button followed by another Download button in the ‘MultiDrive 1.3 Installer’ box. During installation tick ‘I agree with End User License Agreement’ and select your installation folder.

Also decide whether you want to create a MultiDrive shortcut on the desktop; send your anonymous usage data to MultiDrive; and add ‘MultiDrive to PATH’ – which lets you run MultiDrive commands from any folder using Command Prompt or PowerShell without typing its full installation address.

1 Master the MultiDrive dashboard

When you first launch MultiDrive, you’ll arrive at the Dashboard. In the bottom left square you’ll see details of your hard drives and SSDs. In our case, two drives have been recognised. The Samsung Drive is our C: drive ( 1 in our screenshot), which is always the one from which your PC boots. You therefore know that it’s an internal drive and crucial to the running of your machine. You need to be careful what you do with this drive.

The other piece of interesting information is NVMe 2 , which is the name of the interface on our computer’s motherboard to which the drive is attached. It stands for Non-Volatile Memory host controller interface. A drive that connects to this kind of interface is usually long and thin, like a stick of memory, in contrast to a traditional portable drive, which is often about the size of a pack of cards. Knowing this difference gives you a visual indicator of which drive is which if you have several.